In SimCity 2000, the player is an all-powerful mayor-for-life attending to the myriad details of urban growth, such as zoning for residential, commercial, and industrial development; laying out roads and transportation systems; allocating budgets; keeping the lights on; and more. The traditional gaming narratives and systems of goals and rewards are eschewed in favor of what programmers call an open-ended digital sandbox, in which players pursue their own objectives and direct their own stories in a game of their own imagining.

Gallery label from

Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design, September 10, 2022–July 16, 2023

Medium Video game software
Credit Gift of Electronic Arts
Object number 930.2012
Department Architecture & Design

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